3505" 
/9l6 





Copyright N^ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSnV 



ON THE OVERLAND AND 
OTHER POEMS 



By 

Frederick Mortimer Clapp 




NEW HAVEN: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
MDCCCCXVI 






Copyright, 1916 

BY 

Yale University Press 



First printed April, 1916 




MAY 13 1916 
g)CU428979 

^ ^ ^ 1 



CONTENTS. 



On the Overland 

Reverberation 

A Spot of Sun 

Revelation 

The Quarry of Dreams 

Proscription 

Tribute 

The Utter Brink 

Gum-Trees 

Imprisoned 

Krakatoa 

Search-Lights 

Terminations 

Cleared 

Paris: an Hour of Spring 

Noon 

Transmutation 

Mist 

A Birthday Token . 

The River 

Love's Landscape 

A City . 

The Bell 

Serenity 

Cleaving Waters 

Survival 

Toll 

Faces 

Confidence 

Luxembourg Gardens 

Renunciation 



PAGE 

1 
4 
6 
8 
9 
11 
12 
13 
14 
16 
17 
18 
21 
22 
23 
24 
26 
27 
28 
29 
30 
32 
33 
34 
35 
37 
38 
39 
41 
42 
43 



[ V ] 



















PAGE 


Wraiths 45 


Boulevard St. Michel 














46 


Basalt Idols 














47 


Between Sea and Mountain* 


) . 












48 


A Summoning of Death 














49 


The Vortex 














50 


Hypnotic Night 














53 


The Flail of the Shadows . 














54 


Strife .... 














56 


Buddha 


, . 














57 


On the Isar 


, , 














59 


Palms 


, 














60 


The Last Page 


. 














62 


Faith 


, 














63 


After a Year 


, 














65 


By the Pacific 


, 














67 


Shipwreck 


. 














68 


Westward 


, . 














70 


Prairie Fires in 


November 














71 


In a Transept 


. 














72 


Horizons 


. 














73 


Mirage 


, , 














74 


In the Cab of J 


^0. 3303 














76 


Strongholds 


, 














77 


Possession 


• 














79 


Translations. 


From Mallarme: 


I. Les Fleurs 85 


II. Le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe 86 


From Palazzeschi: 


I. La Cena degli Infelici ...... 87 


n. LaR 


egina Carm 


ela 


. 


. 


. 


-* 


. 


89 



[ vi] 



TO 
M. C. C. 

Tea TovTO fxtyvvfievov <{>pevL 



ON THE OVERLAND. 

Out of the desolation and the emptiness, 

the vast flat, gaunt green land, 

out of the pale, primeval, blue sky and the sweet sun, — 

the horizon's gold and silver bastioned, purple-piled cloud 

mountain ranges 
of thunder storms that bring thin rains at night, — 
speak, O thou mute and mighty earth-transfusing spirit, 
speak and break 

the spell of the phantasmal, hurtling, inert, smiling day. 
Voice of the dull-brown haycocks, listless windmills, the barren, 

squat, meek, lonely little houses, 
the glittering, restless, wind-streaked chrysoprase of corn, — 
stark dearth of red earth miles on miles, gigantic palisaded 

rock-ruins crumbling by dry rivers, thistles, daisies, 
lank fences stalking out against the sky 
threading the waste, — 

voice of the soul of this treeless land where never 
the feet of men were set till yesterday, 
speak while the train 
rolls making rhythms, rattling roaring, clicking crashing, 

caught 
out of the emptiness, rhythms of space, sledge-riveted fast and 

faster 
into my spirit, till my spirit makes Its wings of them, — 
nay more, bid thou God's self speak, as from west to eastern 

sea 
wheels whirl me hurl me, hissing, jarring, being bound beyond 

the sea . . . 
Let Him look out with me, with me remember 
what else were but a hopeless cirque of changes, 
the blank stupendous ages of the making, — 
winter, spring, 

[ 1 ] 



the fierce, still summer, autumn when gigantic 
winds hurled down His heavens on His earth, — 
snow, the endless, soothing, saving, silent whiteness, — 
as aeon into less bleak aeon crept. 

world divine ! 

add thou this to thy story, this remember, 

how I caught up upon this beating iron thing, 

saw clear as God sees, 

In one moment seized In my life His life, — 

how I, who foresaw seeing all with Him, 

am all this vast land's dull unaging change, the gorgeous 

harvest, 
and all the blue, pale sky, the fields, the houses, hills, — 

1 who am my love who sits across the ocean ! 

O to be for her sake, being her, creation's self and God's self, 
heart that feels It all and hand that makes and moves 
continent and ocean, earth and heavens, 

as grinding still, still breathless, ponderous, arrowlike, relent- 
less, 
hour on hour we roar. 

The bare land twists and twists and falls behind, 
the cross-treed poles jump up, and flickering drift to nothing — 

dots across the world's edge — 
the eager wires, sagging, heaving on, 
pierce the thin air with windless murmurings 
far flashing light-swift thoughts from sea to sea. 
But thou, more strong to grip life vast and whole, 
greenly to grasp the great world like spring grass, 
bluely to hold it mine like sun-blue seas, 
to see beyond man, nature, fathoming God, — 
be quicker than thy dreams, O soul of mine . . . 
speed, speed, thou more than God, thou throbbing, whistling 

pulse of all things, — 
life, love ... 

[ 2 ] 



and, O to be with you, my love, to be with you ! 
Desire makes all our fiery, shouting speed, stagnation, 
makes as the dead past nations yet to spring here 
throned In the pregnant waste grown radiant, 

and less than figments of a dying dream 
the aeon-bullded earth, the building God 
who knows no more than day and night, blue sky, green 

earth, — who blindly makes and passes, 
groping with mighty hands that shaping feel 
ever from nothing into nothingness . . . 

I, — O my all-embracing soul, my life's God-conquering, God- 
creating soul-vibration, — 
I listen, care what has been, what will yet be, 
love, being you, who fly to you ? 



[ 3 ] 



REVERBERATION. 

The voice of the sea 
is the past unfurled, 
unfurled In the face 
of things to be 
till the end of space 
and the end of time ; 

in the dreary chime 
that swells and swings 
through the song it sings 
to the dumb dead shore, 
a passion clings 
and a grief that wrings 
the heart of God; 

all death-doomed things 
find utterance deep 
of that despair 
which haunts the grave, 
in the crowning sweep 
and hopeless fall 
of wave on wave ; 

it binds with a sigh 
the shores of the world, 
it mocks with the cry 
of a hope's recall 
all things that die 
and know not why ; 

like a moan from the lips 
of the dead it slips 
down barren sands 

[4] 



in far-off lands, 
where round grey ships 
of rich emprise, 
that sailed in vain, 
the slow tides rise 
and ebb again; 

it has known all things 
since first the light 
beneath God's wings 
of pity and grace 
broke o'er its face, 
and it sees afar 
how the last dim star 
winks out its flight 
through the last long night; 

for the voice of the sea 
is the past unfurled, 
unfurled in the face 
of things to be 
till the last day dies 
in the womb of space, 
and the dead arise, 
and death is dead, 
and time is fled. 



[ 5 ] 



A SPOT OF SUN. 

Through the torn curtain, 

suddenly, 

a spot of sunshine falls on the floor. 

Mottled by the window-pane 

it quivers like a golden lizard on the red and yellow pine 

boards; 
it is silent and very bright ; it creeps 
and grows and crawls up to my shoe . . . 
I feel its warmth in my foot. 

Will life transmit no more 

of its arrowy all-experiencing 

journey through space and time 

than this trembling little silvering spot? 

elusive bright creeping of the flame of light! 
how humbly and how strangely 

you strew your fragments round me ! 

What do you keep of the aeonic conflagration 

of the titanic sun 

that this fly may walk unharmed across your splendour? 

What of the all-pervading glittering arms 

you lock the shining sea, the green earth, in,— 

you accountable to life for all the flowers? 

Can you forget the rumble of hiving cities 

where you sow men as prodigally 

as in the fields your yellow flowers? 

My room is bright with your creeping. 

1 read an old history and see in you 
the glinting spears of Alexander 
creeping toward Babylon 

beside the Euphrates 

[ 6 ] 



that writhes through the land 
like a broad sleepy serpent 
with rippling scales of gold. 

The piping of young birds I hear 
in the cypress bough by the window, 
flies humming 
and a breeze in the surf-loud gum-tree. 



[7] 



REVELATION. 

Over the roofs the shrilling swallows sang, 

swift circling sounds winged in the deepening sky 

where the blue twilight thinned, 

and dreams that brought no words up to your lips 

came dimly to your face. 

Screaming they rushed along the quiet air, 

as if caught up upon a whirling wind 

shot hotly through the cool light softening where 

the stars came not to seek their changing place. 

And something passed, and I, — who knew not why 

(though groping on from trace to strange, faint trace 

left by your wandering eyes upon my heart) 

your shadow should have broken that eclipse 

life cast upon my life, and could not find, 

in any dimmest corner of my mind, 

the primal, unremembered, shadowy thing 

that drew you to me, and me, love, to you, — 

saw, as you turned and heard the swallows sing, 

sharp-eddying through the twilight's breathless blue, 

as through a rifted memory, how you knew 

that unremembered thing, — and I knew too ; 

so when my lips felt yours, and darkness flowed 

in on me making silence where we were, — 

a visible silence like a mist that glowed, — 

I felt along my blood the lost thing stir 

familiar like a vision that had been 

my life in some far-off, forgotten place, — 

the fate behind my fate and born with me, 

though only then, after what wanderings, seen 

clear like a dawn upon your listening face. 



[ 8 ] 



THE QUARRY OF DREAMS. 

I stand upon a hilltop with the sun 
and call the old numb mountains, and they stir, 
where tumbled fugitives in huddled heaps, 
they lie beyond the ravaged plains of thought. 

I cry across my smouldering thoughts and they, 
grovelling and hoary, turn up whimpering eyes 
full of the embers of exultant towers, — 
seared towers of my miraculous myriad-domed 
high-windowed city of the iire-charred plain . . . 
My thoughts have all been conquered and laid waste. 
Only untameable, unalterable 
things, the sea, the mountains and the night, 
live, and I call upon them and they come. 

The mountains creep up to the creeping sea, 
the night, with impotent footfall and scarred eyes, 
climbs where I stand upon my crumbling hill ; 
my strength has gone out into them, my life 
trembles from me into their hungry sleep. 

High on the fog-swept hillside lies a deep 

deserted quarry, dead womb of the ruined 

arched seven-fold gates and columned streets of thought; 

and in its darkness hover wisps of sound, — 

perplexed sounds once in sculptural intricacy 

shaped by impatient hammers and swift steel 

into my peopled porticoes of the plain . . . 

I listen and I hear the crumbling and 
upbuilding of innumerable 
cities in impermanence as of old, — 
wide-soaring undulations of lost dreams, 

[9] 



presentiments forgotten that still cling 

like wind-shred mists about a headland's crags, 

slow-fingered mutterings of imprisoned visions, 

heart-bursts irreconcilable, and shout 

and tense black jagged throb of ebon drums. 

Untameable, unalterable things 
crowd up upon me, and my very life 
trembles out from me to their hungry sleep ; 

but now I know not mountains, night nor sea, — 

though all my thought lies levelled and laid waste, 

and I for desolation call them, — shall 

blot out the forsaken quarry where I hew, 

among these echoes of rent symphonies, 

new moated cities for thought's plundered plains. 



[ 10] 



PROSCRIPTION. 

There Is something strange and stealthy in your eyes 

that turns my heart upon Itself In vain, 

for I have never known this subtle pain, 

this grief which is too frail for tears or sighs; 

beyond my fears, beyond my dreams. It lies 

In far-off lands where days and flowers wane 

forgotten, and grey, unregretful rain 

crumbles the fragile sunset ere It dies; 

something it Is like lips we cannot see, 

that, faint through odorous breathings of the night, 

blow mists of music when pale fingers light 

the hollow mountain of the stars with morn, — 

something it Is that knew ere earth was born 

the Incommunicable sadness of the sea. 



[ 11 ] 



TRIBUTE. 

Love binds mine eyes with silence, O my love, 

though spring in deep roots and chill ground foments 

this beryl leafiness, this yellow snow 

of broom, and blood of roses, — sifts this mist 

of shimmering poppies on the saffron hills; 

though his blue breath bring shoals of clouds that swim,- 

enormous, gold-finned, mute and sapphire-eyed, — 

their shoreless pale sea staring at the world; 

though from dark birth-pulse in the sun-searched earth 

his rapturous tremor wing through death to love, 

bursting in leaf and petal, wind, cloud, sun, 

joyous, phantasmal as the unslumbering mind, — 

Love will not loosen winter from my heart 

nor yet unclasp the inarticulate, 

the undelivered urgency of love, 

nor yield me speech I strain to, mightier still 

than his. 

Love binds mine eyes with silence. Though I gaze 

as the sun gazes, suck life's sunshine up, 

aspire as topmost leaves of young trees tossed 

by morning showers, — 

though hope's flame in me utterly consume 

to white dust all the faggots of the soul, 

he binds mine eyes with silence ! This is praise 

beyond all lyric mystery fading now 

(even as I yearn unenvious of his voice) 

of birth or spring! 



[12] 



THE UTTER BRINK. 

I know not why to-day it Is I feel 

a formless sudden hand upon my heart 

close tightening fingers ; mists of numbness steal 

into my throbbing brain ; I seem to sink 

through seas of night where black clouds break apart 

before me falling to the utter brink 

of space beyond the stars; vague voices cry 

drearily around me in the night and die 

like ebbing waves upon a hollow reef, — 

strange strangled whispers of an ancient grief 

they seem, and faint and far-off ; then, O near, 

as if my dead blood murmured in my ear, 

they sob, and something drags upon my breath; 

then comes a face pallid for fear and sin 

with wild dim eyes that drink the darkness in, 

and on my mouth I feel the mouth of death. 



[ 13 ] 



GUM-TREES. 

To-day like lips the mysteries 

are parted of these tremulous trees — 

these supple soaring gum-trees; I 

have made my own their destinies, 

like them I know the elusive sky, ^ 

like them I snare in a tangled net 

of shifting boughs dawn, noon, sunset. 

The mauve smooth stems swing skyward, 

sunward, 

I hold my face up to the rustling shower, 

the green-grey spray and silvery shiver 

of sickle leaves; 

with their sap I climb, with their leaves I quiver, 

I float with them on the endless river, 

the shoreless river of life and spring; 

till sudden lithe winds seize the trees 

and then I sink deep under seas 

to an inverted world where earth 

is poured along the tides of birth 

tumultuous, and in my brain 

I feel repass and pass again 

the shuttles of clear ecstasies . . . 

Remorseless winds invade the trees — 

my spirit swirls and cries aloud 

and shudders like a rooted thing; 

great savage winds assail the trees — 

they shake and foam and fling themselves 

across the blue beach of the sky; 

like spindrift where a steep shore shelves 

they crash and boom against the wind, 

surge up and writhe and staggering lift 

[ 14] 



Indomitable arms and, blind 

with grim rage, grapple with the sky 

and beat upon a silent cloud. 

Shimmering green glitter of these sickle leaves ! 

The sudden naked winds are dead, 

the dream fades out before my eyes; 

I see the flickering blithe sky flit 

in through the dangling downpour. It 

winks myriad wings like myriad eyes; 

a sweet deep amber-breathing scent 

of dead laid leaves and scaled curled bark 

rises like mist through the level light; 

a bird's song spiring soars and dies. 

The glistening waves of the wind run up 

the brown lank grass and lick the sky 

at the bare bright top of the hill; the mauve 

smooth languid stems swayed to and fro 

sweep fiery cliffs of crumbling clouds. 

And I sink again deep under seas 

to their Inverted world where earth 

is poured along the tides of birth, 

and from green depths, far out o'er bars 

of night the quickening sunset melts, 

I hear the seething urge of life 

rush legion-winged against the stars. 



[ 15 ] 



IMPRISONED. 

Ah love, here, soothing sorrow born of dreams, 
where nature bends to artifice, a hand 
precise and genial lays, with watchful wand, 
measure on flower and tree. Here, half-seen, gleams 
gravely the marble, gravely the pool's rim; streams 
in white clean channels purr; shorn sharp trees stand 
postured like emerald peacocks and the sand 
of paths I walk with symbols quaintly teems. 

Ah love, here soothing sorrow, how shall I 

from clipped hedge and clear fountain and the prim 

starred song of flowers weave a patterned whim 

wild hope may grow to and be beautiful, 

while, like my thoughts of you made visible, 

sailing uncharted seas the wind-free clouds steer by? 



[ 16 ] 



KRAKATOA. 

This, like a wave the whole sea lifts and fills, 

cliff-faced, sharp-heaving, white as snow-tipped hills — 

this tidal surge and impulse of the soul — 

shivers life's ice-fanged crater's glittering bowl 

and, bursting ere the mind foretells or wills, 

sweeps up like fire time's riven dust of ills 

flung from the sudden earthquake of the heart 

in thronging clouds wherethrough love's lightenings start,- 

dead ills and dust now, ills erewhile the flowers 

thought sowed on life's slope and seared seeds thereof, — 

sweeps youward on a storm that strains and streams 

beyond the night of memory, in what hours 

(Ah, star-blown ashes shot with light of dreams!) 

to flush a sunset for the eyes I love? 



[ 17] 



SEARCH-LIGHTS. 

We sat until the clinking coals were filmed 

with rifted caving ashes, we in whom 

our spirit's sharp vibration turned to light 

the dark far-wielded mind. The little room, 

lit with unbaffled interplay 

of shifting unsheathed whetted thought, 

shone as we sought, 

through the uncloven night that girds the soul, 

to strike the implacable steel of vision 

beyond the dark's derision. 

We talked by love of light enthralled; the last 

blue-flaming coal 

from fire-white chilled to ashen white, and I 

through a wide window saw against the sky 

search-lights of unseen ships 

that in the swell-swept ofling rode 

at guard upon the quivering thousand-eyed 

sleep of the city; 

blinding they flashed and blazed and slid 

upon the impassive silent night, 

swept and brandished, 

wheeled and slanting, 

sword on shivered broad sword parried, 

whirled, uphurled, and laid at rest 

tremulous against the west; 

wing with startled wing in flight, 

rainbow'-dyed; 

fingering scintillations mowed 

down like yellow grain; crisp-plied 

swing of fan on flaming fan; 

[ 18 ] 



nebulous flocking fiery stains 
that on the sky sprang up and ran 
wind-swift across invisible wide plains. 

Shuttling they swarmed and shook, 

sheer fanes they built up with the poles 

for base, the stars for buttresses, — immeasurable frames 

of interlacing vaultings, phantom groins, 

tower and portal, 

apse and aisle supernal, — 

the spiritual city broad as space 

and immemorial 

as time. 

I watched, 

and watching heard a silence fall 

at last 

on our fleet fire-side speech 

the proud soul sifted with its exaltation. 

Out in the night a slow thick-throated horn 

groaned and was still and groaned and seemed to call 

to fainter whimpering cries effaced 

upon some drifting nightmare of the sea . . . 

The slow thick-throated horn was numb 

and strangled by an eyeless thing 

stealthy, malign and dumb. 

But still 

above the black insidious sea, 

upflung, far-flaring ceaselessly, 

the spectral search-lights unsubdued 

crossed and recrossed, 

retraced, renewed 

[ 19 ] 



kaleidoscopic patterns of unborn 

dreams on the chill, 

low-creeping, life-obliterating wing 

and toothless, padded prowling of the fog. 



[20] 



TERMINATIONS. 

I saw when autumn's flame was lit afar 

on golden hills that couch the sinking sun, 

in a great sunset earth and sky burn one 

for glory, while a breathless eastern star, 

first ministrant of night, withheld the bar 

of darkness, and I knew some goal was won, 

foredoomed in ages dead and passion-spun 

by God's own dreams that were not what they are. 

Ah, like some mighty drama's end it seemed, 
crowning the pageant of ten thousand years, 
as, burdened with a mystery, I dreamed 
of pallid lilies sear in strange decays 
and shadowy faces mounting shadowy ways 
with frail songs ebbing faint in falling tears. 



[21] 



CLEARED. 

Exquisite indwelling cry of rain 

out on these white and marching infinite 

wave-armies staggering shoreward through the night! 

The unwitherable strength of sky and sea 

wavers and desolate and bodiless, 

heedless and indecipherably driven 

under the exquisite bleak cry of rain, 

convulses at the unshaken foot of this 

tide-eaten crag in obdurate agonies 

and reabsorbs its foam of frantic hands. 

Now scarce a sigh to the long foamless beach 

clings, a trailing mist of ghostly light 

clutches at darkness as wind-weary birds 

clutch at the smooth face of a basalt crag. 

Tortuous grey stricken sobbing of the rain! 

My mind precipitate in the chill of thought 

sweeps over, as your cry upon the sea, 

the mutinous retreat of refluent life, 

till transubstantiate on the baffled tide, 

a phantom in the foam-frail prism of time, 

it reassumes identity and leans, 

a tower of shuddering sails through bursting spray, 

far seaward into vastness and the night 

with swung blurred lights that gleam and reel and fade 

to me who turn across the unearthly sands 

to let my alien body move again 

among the patterned granite streets and past 

the unsearchable windows of the lives of men. 



[ 22 ] 



PARIS: AN HOUR OF SPRING. 

A tram-car banging clanging to I'Etoile 

down the drab Boulevard des Invalides, 

trees cropped to their last twig awaiting spring, 

nurses and children trundling hoop and doll, 

women and soldiers sauntering, the breed 

of Fashion swathed in supple stuffs that cling, 

rocked in slow cabs or swirled with lurch and swing 

in swift soft-purring motors, and the need 

of air and light and joy on every face . . . 

O great French life that darkest agony 

leaves on your brave bright features scarce a trace 

now you are free in your regenerate hour ! 

The very streets are song and your lean tower 

bites like a hurled lance through the astonished sky ! 



[23 ] 



NOON. 

It Is twelve o'clock noon, 

whistles blowing, bells ringing; 

half the day Is gone. 

I sit here filled with menacing thoughts 

that grow up out of a bird's singing 

as the jinnee grew 

in smoke and flame 

from the fabulous bottle 

found on the beach. 

It is twelve o'clock noon, 

half the day is gone. 

And the morning, when I awoke so undeservedly 

out of the blessed numbness of sleep. 

Is now to me the same 

as Pharaoh, 

as alien and distant and uncommunicative 

as the pyramids. 

I live In a wandering dot 

that was once so many other days with their sunshine, — 

like to-day's very sunshine, — 

and yet are now dead and so far now forever. 

Can I never grip my hour, — 

this hour that narrows to the pen-point with which I write 

and, between the stroke begun and ended. 

Is with yesterday and the dust of eternal night? 

Is nothing stored up, 

no valour, no loftiness, no ardour? 

Yesterday I walked over the tawny hills above the sea . . . 

The sea, does It still lap those rocks 

though the film of it that came into me 

is now with Irretraceable eternity? 

[ 24 ] 



Dear love ! and you, you will not help me ? 

stay with your all-intelligent eyes and seeing smile 

the incessant dissolution? 

Have you no power, no art 

to set me free, 

your captive, from my jiggling dot of life 

that skims on unexpanded, 

between waking and sleeping, 

through all the evanescent sights and sounds 

of living? 

Do you not see how steep the hour just lived through falls 

away? 
how steep the gulf this coasting minute edges along 
of the yawning future ? 
Reach out your hand, the place is dizzy, I 
have found no foothold . . . 
Dear, alone there is 
no foothold I would find. 



[25 ] 



TRANSMUTATION. 

Sunset : the city shudders vast and gaunt 

and drives its grim jaws harder in the hill; 

the slim moon sinks where white as frost the chill, 

windless bay shimmers ; gulls in legions haunt 

the paven waters; sinister their cry 

and sinister those huge dun wings which ply 

their shadows rising to them as they dip; 

from cloud-swathed islands veers a fire-beaked ship. 

Thought eats out life's transparent shell and leaves 

a mirage and a silence ; like a leaf 

I flutter through the landscape of my thought; 

night : where the city stood a columned sheaf 

of giant towers crushes a voice that grieves 

amongst them with some hateful wrong distraught. 



[26 ] 



MIST. 

A mist has eaten up the prostrate land; 

I hear the wingless silence of the mist 

crawling upon the glazed eyes of the hours — 

dim dying hours some shadowy plague has kissed; 

I feel a stealthy sickness in these flowers 

whose petals rain inaudibly in showers 

around me ; and I cannot understand 

the thought that eats my life up like a mist. 

I listen and remember how they were 

the hours that thrilled at dawn across the sea 

singing to me a spray-sharp ecstasy 

perfumed with golden perfume of these flowers, — 

but I am all a sickness, and in showers 

their poisoned petals, by some bleak decree, 

across the stagnant silence of the hours, 

keep falling, falling through these mists that blur 

out all the numb dumb land and soundless sea. 

My thought has eaten up my life like mist ; 
a mist has eaten up the sea and land; 
the flowers have no petals left to shed 
upon the stricken land where all is dead, 
save what not death himself can understand — 
this crawling mist that eats away the land, 
— this thought that eats my life up like a mist. 



[27] 



A BIRTHDAY TOKEN. 

Life's self resumes life's story year by year, 

glad with earth's gladness, if her smile mask not 

some inconceived deep desolation. Else 

what sings this bronzed green the gum-tree flings 

lyric in fountain-shiverings that a bird 

utters clear-throated throbbing sight with sound? 

Ask and be healed, O heart self-doomed to watch, 

from thought's domed palace-prison, myriad leaves 

the stars unfold and buds the breeze breaks — watch 

the eternal sequence songful and resigned 

of life's bright background's manifolded change ! 

Which lives, my thought or this cloud-landscape spun 

of all unheeding days? O flower of broom 

so yellow in the dawn when cypresses 

hug to their writhed arms night, O hyacinth 

that lingers and anemone and rose, 

silence thought's humming wings and tell me: she, 

has she more kinship with him or with this, 

this amethystine spray of tamarisk 

that falls not but through soft successive days 

melts into green and cheers the envious lawn? 

Is there some mask of desolation deep 

in life's resuming life so? Speak for me, 

tokens and fragments of the fading spring! 



[28 ] 



THE RIVER. 

Crisp-flashing like a snow-born brook 
whose glittering voice is splashed among 
wild flowers that sway and to it chant 
its ceaseless utter ecstasy, 
life limpid as the starlight swirls, 
enfranchised from eternity, and curls 
down the white hills with laughter shook 
from pool to blue pool of the years; 

till, through some deep unscalable 
hewn canyon of the mind, 
a yellow river of the past 
bescummed with malady, it find, 
past deafening caves and maniac falls, 
past labyrinths of leprous walls, 
the desert's ghastly noon at last. 

Ah, the straight gaze of vision's sun, 
the untempered living heat of thought ! 
Like a stunned snake in agony 
it writhes out into gleaming bogs 
where even bitter grasses die, 
there, hard as fired chalcedony, 
to flash its topaz to the sky. 



[ 29 ] 



LOVE'S LANDSCAPE. 

Over the hill-engirdled plain, 

the vine-garlanded, grape-laden, 

where lived my love I went 

breathing the dew-chill, mist-warm, early sunshine, 

low-slanting, opalescent, 

till I was all a radiance of its splendour, 

with such hungry passion drank L 

Swift the landscape wheeled away and wheeled away and lent 

to me sense revived of harvests, 

spirit harvests rich divinely she had meant 

but to be love's seeming setting 

ere is bent 

over us the scythe obscure, for the first time and the last time, 

in the fire and the rapture 

of life's, love's 

supreme event. 

Tasselled corn, 

furrowed fields, 

golden-green and green and gold things came and went ; 

gleamed the reaper's hook, 

gleamed the brown feet of the girls that stoop and glean, 

gleamed the villas high on grey hills, 

gleamed the river mist 

that sent 

round each moveless cypress and each flickering troubled 

poplar 
purple curling tendrils rent 
by the shifting of the feet of little winds; 
rose the scent 
of a sea breathed over flowers, 

[ 30] 



opulent flowers, 

and blown from far away, 

as her thoughts are blown to me, — 

blown far and faint and tender 

over gardens of our dreams 

from her soul's autumnal sea. 

autumn land and autumn-sweetened sun I 
you are like my love, you are her, and my eyes 
commemorate her gazing at you now. 

With this throbbing fluttering to you of my heart 

1 give you all significance, in her 
begun 

and in her ended. Destinies 

are visions manifested. You have won 

her destiny through me ; I see her stir 

in you, O landscape beating with her heart I 



[31 ] 



A CITY. 

The jar and thunder of your blind great heart 
dies never and forever your eyes ply 
their hungry lingerings of a lecherous smile; 
you have been passion's prostitute and are 
life's, — you that madly love him though the cry 
of death cleaves to your tongue and like a dial, 
spread on the poisoned cage of street and mart, 
your face is where all things that live and die 
hang their eternal shadows, where the vile 
revolve upon the fair and leave one scar 
on the long memory of God, while high 
above your giant ships, your pile on pile 
of smoking pomp, the stars as carelessly 
look down as they look on a sailless sea. 



[32] 



THE BELL. 

A bell's abrupt deep pealing in my brain 
expands a massive clamour. Stroke on stroke 
it clangs a midnight, then low-hovering 
its humming settles upon silence and 
drowsy it shrugs a numb half-folded wing 
and thrusts its claws into the corpse of time. 
Like a sick outcast crumpled on himself, 
having cried out for sudden ghastliness 
of dreams, it sleeps as sleeps a furtive stream 
that slinks with foamless mouth into the sea. 

I lie back staring at the window-pane 

grey with a watery greyness. In my blood 

and in the steady beating of my heart 

life lapses like a stream into the sea. 

This phantom bell resumes fatality 

and gives me kinship with the leaf that falls, 

a moth's wings and the chill of stricken suns . . . 

Before the vast inanimate, behind 

the vast inanimate; it swings upon 

a tidal wave between two lethargies. 

Yet all I know for all its vigilant toll, 

for all this mimic throbbing of my heart, 

is that at last another day is dead. 



[33 ] 



SERENITY. 

The heraldry of sunset swinging troops 

over the great green hills, broad-bannered, red, 

and flashed with steel a wingless mist enloops 

the black cape footed steeply in the sea ; 

and I am vibrant with serenity 

and drowse because the warlike day is dead; 

I hear white blossoms puff on puff unclose 

on almond trees in a perfumed haze of light, 

the waves that smile I hear and winds that doze, 

I see crisp stars smote from the forge of night. 



[ 34] 



CLEAVING WATERS. 

Encompassed, barriered, bounded 

by crags immeasurable 

the waterless bed of my spirit's wasted torrent . . . 

the debris of the hillsides and the splintered rock of heritage, 
uprooted forest-shafts of what ardent other lives 

where my spirit foamed and fought its way to death ! 

The mountains, dead and twisted with the torture of the whole 

earth, 
bones of a million million beings, the monstrous mountains, 
these, with thoughtless riot gnawing day and night 
(my life escaped the glacial slopes of birth), 

1 wore where song and strife were, 
when strife and song were one. 

quickener and blasting sun 

whose unregarding myriad hands a moment stir the mountains, 
and out of a million deaths kneaded by a million ages 
makes life for me, and death too makes for me, 
there Is no wherefore in your coming 
and no whither In your going. 

Encompassed, barriered, bounded 

by crags inscrutably sheer, 

amid the wreck of aeons and the waste of all the ages, 

1 hew a furrow for some other spring, 

some brief chance wanton river that will thaw and leap and 

thunder 
to water the dead chasm of my passion 
with what Impetus of casual life and wear 
away the monstrous mountains, 
the Inert ancestral mountains, 

[ 35 ] 



and rend them with white joy of the struggle's clamorous 

rhythm ; 
and he, whoe'er the stream is, he too shall be 
withered and the channel in the living bedrock riven 
be yet another's ; 

and the hills shall seem to change not 
though through us who die they change, 
they pass, are not so stable as the spray is, 
are not so steadfast as the echo is. 

And this remains, 

this only, 

this primordial, — 

the eternal hunger felt in death for being, 

the eternal hunger felt in life for death, 

the downward unstayable rush of cleaving waters 

that tear forever walls they may not rend, 

the strain that makes what is seek self-annihilation, 

the need that stirs what is not with a thirst once more to be, 

the urgency of light wakening forever 

death to life, 

and waking, withering 

life to death. 



[ 36] 



SURVIVAL. 

A mighty meditation sets me free 

into that last vast night whose mountains hang 

forever round the dwindhng pools of day; 

a blank black land interminably still 

I walk in where in aeons dead a sea 

ground a sharp shore ; crags splintered to a fang, 

grim, jagged, gigantic, cloven with ruin, nod 

o'er voids unthinkable that churn and spill 

soundlessly seas of darkness; silence, space, 

are hollower round me than the waste that is 

the unsearchable soul, — I walk as in my soul; 

I am become death's own last fixed grimace, 

slain life's rock-ribbed inert rent chrysalis, 

outlasting doom, surviving even God. 



[37] 



TOLL. 

I who so love you have your love on lease 

renewed to me each evening by your soul, 

and like a tenant in arrears I dole 

you out my love, too poor to buy surcease 

of loving and too proud to claim release, 

bankrupt of love ; that is the bitter toll, 

penury's penalty, I pay to roll 

back from my heart hardly the day's increase 

of interest on your loving me, — so great 

the burden of my love's insolvency 

till you of all your spirit make me free 

for love's sake; then were life the price thereof, 

what were my life for that which turns my state 

from bondage into empire even of love? 



[ 38 ] 



FACES. 

Faces — 

seven by seven we face one another, 

knees and cheeks jiggling. 

The window-cases 

crash, and the chauffeur's steel clutch wobbles, 

quivers like a reed as we clamour on the stones. 

Faces, red puffy faces, grey lean faces, 

all joggled together swaying as we lurch, 

reel and recover and sit straight again, — 

each of them chiselled by the generations that ride no more 

(they are the earth over which in turn we wriggle), 

by the fate of the ogress-bodied, whore-faced city, 

by children, wife, by father, mother, 

by the years that rub wind-like fingers on their flesh and search 

upon their features for death's secret sign, — 

strangers to one another 

in spite of all the kneading tumult of the centuries, they pour 

into this many-windowed lumbering thing, 

into this grinding vortex of iron and wood, 

whirled on forces unthinkable as God or death — 

sucked up from far-off little rooms in silent little houses by 

hope, by pity, 
by passion of greed, fear, lust, love, exaltation, misery — they 

weaving coarse or fine 
around others like themselves, others still to be born through 

the interminable years, 
their destiny from a skein 

of a million acts,^themselves the product, the Intense vibra- 
tion's overtone 
of the cyclonic space-sweeping ages — moments ineffable each, 
drops in the unending impalpable rain 
of being . . . 

[ 39 ] 



Faces, 

seven by seven, 

red bloated faces like the faces of the drowned, 

grey haggard-eyed haunted human faces, 

so very old they are, so very tired! 

What have they been, what will they be, 

and what desired so fiercely that it strangles them and sears 

their eyes and makes them make themselves a prison night and 

day? 
Cut in half by their tense-drawn newspapers they seem alone 
as nothing is alone, — beyond the reach, 
in the fastnesses of unimaginable life-deserted places, 
of God's eye even. 

A black hand shoots upon the brake, 

the motor races; 

we stop, we file out stooping, 

faces still, 

mere rags within, without, — 

faces. 



[40] 



CONFIDENCE. 

Give life her way. Let never your heart be 
forearmed of thought to hold her wisdom strange. 
Shall thought outsail bright life whose wings estrange 
thought from his pathless path across time's sea? 
Give life her way. White hope's high sovereignty 
no mandate knows to stay her singing range 
(bride as she is of death whose son is change) 
this side the sheer coast of eternity. 

The very God of Gods, and all man's creeds 
are but strange flickering visions of her face, — 
blind births of hunger out of terror bred. 
She passes like a wind, and like dry weeds 
the generations blaze up in their place 
under her fire-swift footstep . . . and are dead. 



[41 ] 



LUXEMBOURG GARDENS. 

In the octagonal opal of the pool 
the spurting fountain's upflung swaying stem 
drifts a transparent mist down the thin wind, 
and close-reefed through its rainbow spatter steer, 
rail under, children's boats. The evening cool 
from cloud-built mountains trails a clinging hem 
down the long alley of clipped trees ; behind, 
a palace of its own bleak memories bare, — 
so little mark leaves passion upon stone ! 
House a queen loved are you too dull to care 
that they whose cheap blood ran to rear you rule 
France? The swayed jet gleans the sun's last leer 
and, upflung, rains a rainbow on the pool. 



[42 ] 



RENUNCIATION. 

I leave you, and my body quivering cries 

against you and is dumb, and flash on flash 

my nerves and brain break into crackling light 

that splits a world of blackness — I am sick 

because I know you know what tortures me. 

You, who have lured my passion to my lips, 

have strangled so my heart that I have left 

nothing within but night and silence ; you 

have given yet taken more than you can give . . . 

What would you have you have not ere you ask? 

Love? But you know I love you ! Life? Life's pulse 

beats only time to this pulse in your throat . . . 

Your eyes are gardens where I wander lost 

between sharp starlight and frail odours breathed 

from lips of flowers I cannot see, — I walk, 

like one who dreams when dreams are agony 

and desolation, in a world that mocks 

me with tenuous perfume and pale sound 

as of white waters dripping through the night 

from precious urns in haze-blue fountains lit 

with light-exhaling flowers — phantom paths 

leaf-brown, and black sharp cypresses that cut 

moveless between the stars; statues and bowers 

that hear no sound save petals that uncurl 

to life, and petals falling light to death, 

or ghostly footfall of a wraithlike wind 

walking like one in sleep among the flowers — 

wondrous night of gardens folding me 
out of my life in eyes that are my life, 
my world of passionate oblivion, — 

1 have forgotten all things for your sake, 
I have forgotten my own self and you . . . 

[43 ] 



Yet I would call myself back, I must go 

out of your wind-warm world where all Is dim 

and rare and wild and wonderful and cool. 

I cannot choose but go ; it is the night 

and not the garden that I fear, — yet O, 

can it be only what I fear is you, 

or, love, can it be only it is I? 



[ 44 ] 



WRAITHS. 

Sometimes like shifting tides upon the shore 
of windless seas my grey dreams ebb and flow, — 
still seas where some frail sunset's afterglow 
flickers like life round lips that breathe no more; 
and sometimes like a dim forgotten lore 
no tongue can read nor any heart may know, 
they glimmer on torn pages that the slow 
dumb hand of time turns dreamless o'er and o'er. 
And evermore they change, these wraiths of pain, 
they pass through crumbling gates of barren ways, 
they pass and fade and ghostlike come again, — 
perhaps as stars foredoomed to fail and set, 
or flower-petalled passions that forget 
how pale hope lingers hopeless in my days. 



[45 ] 



BOULEVARD ST. MICHEL. 

White sky, black domes, one green star swinging low, 
a sharp clean fall of twilight after rain, — 
above the roofs, blue vapours thinned with blood, 
then in a trice, the chill and purple night. 
The street lamps keenly catch, white row by row, 
threading the defile where with roar and strain 
life's cataract traffic crashes in full flood, 
and million-eyed crawls like a foam of light. 

It is her hour : shop-windows glare and leer, — 
chalk-faced, lips scarlet, eyebrows, eyelids kohled, 
in spectral shreds of gaiety gone cold 
she barters lust for life. The crowds seethe on, 
the sidewalks blaze, the stars that know her peer . . . 
Face after face stares blankly and is gone. 



[46] 



BASALT IDOLS. 

The sea is empty as a desert land, 

the land is barren as an empty sea, 

one level waste save where like mountains stand, 

immobile in their mute malignity, 

twin shapes of death with ponderous feet of stone; 

a timeless silence, an eternal black 

immensity of silence, tightens round 

their faces reared gigantic in the track 

of swarming stars that, loosened from profound 

abysses of the dead sky, gutter down 

on the dead land. The night is like a snake 

coiled lifeless on the twin vast brows of death. 



[ 47 ] 



BETWEEN SEA AND MOUNTAINS. 

Out-throbbed the ecstasy, bedded the pain ! 

Our sea-born, wave-swept passion strains away, 

reed-choked in chill, still, winding, shining creeks 

of thought; on life's slime-rooted stubble, — fog. 

Yet day, sun-coiled, lied grandly: "Fog again 

will crawl up from the vastness never!" — day 

who plays us traitor with a golden face 

when the tide's up, this very tide that leaks 

in driblets through a fetid flat, and sleeks 

its glut, down-sucked obscurely to a grey, 

a shipless, voiceless, lightless sea. Blind cog 

on cog out-grinding what ? What sluiced the race 

of waters from the unplumbed? — More, love's peaks 

shouldering the stars, what heaped them round this bog? 



[48 ] 



A SUMMONING OF DEATH. 

He woke and saw It at his bedside. He 

knew it and longed to greet it. He could see 

that it knew him. Its look was an appeal 

for silence. He was silent. It was real 

and yet unreal. His raised eyes saw how tall 

It was. It did not move. He did not move. But all 

that they had said about it or he thought 

was like a dream. He wondered what had brought 

it now. His prayers? His fears? It seemed to think 

back over things forgotten. Through a chink 

in the shut blinds a noisy fly flew in, 

buzzed, butting the white window. Helplessly 

on that shrill sound he floated to the brink 

of still white skies alive with smothering wings. 

The buzzing ceased. Intent on far-off things 

it stood beside him listening. Then it heard 

something unspoken. He heard not a word. 

It heard and turned. He reached out . . . Agony, 

months of it, smote upon him like a sea. 

He reached out, screamed, if any scream could be 

in the black hollowness he plunged through. Strain 

as strain he would he clutched at nothing. Pain I 

Eternity was pain. He felt it give — 

an earthquake through Its dense dark bulk. Again, 

pain! Then a dim thin voice: "Now he may live?" 



[49 ] 



THE VORTEX. 

Like a mask on a night when a vast storm is drifting 

the skies into doom 

(though here is strange light 

of witchery islanded frail mid disaster) — 

these dancers a tyrannous music swirls lifting 

and shifting like leaves into glow out of gloom. 

Like magic fen-fires they burgeon and bloom 
into pageants as pale as the sheen of old moons 
across the blind face of a fathomless room, — 
the dome of star-dialled, still-footed, huge ages, — 
strange petal-like people 

In moth-fragile moments of moth-fragile beauty to moth- 
fragile tunes I 

Is it only a figment's seduction, the grace 

of their intimate intricate drifting and shifting, 

over which hangs the mace 

of eternity, heavy with vastness, and blind with the race 

of ghosts that have glowed as they glow, and have whirled as 

they whirl, 
and have loved and been loved, and dropped down In their 

place? 

(Like a mask In the night, — 

the mute mocking room, 

and these phantoms dim music enslaves, the pale light 

they create, that creates them, the ocean of doom 

flowing out of the endlessness Into the endlessness, pitiless, 

vast, 
on the stream of a dream where no birth is, no death Is, no 

future, no past!) 

[ 50 ] 



And these faces aglow 

with a grace, a seduction 

God's dream did not know, 

in the blank room's deduction, 

are shadows that glitter and eddy and go 

to a measure of meaningless music that flows as dreams flow,- 

mere myriad wraiths of a brain that forgets them, 

that made them and lets them 

go endlessly dance, 

to a throb that His hand in the flame of creation 

wrought in them and laughed at some marvel of chance ? 

(Like a mask in the night 

upon rhythms supernal, 

they drift and enkindle a tissue of light, — 

a flame-woven pageant more baseless than mist is 

at sunset, and less than the lip that unkissed is, 

though lip upon lip make a light out of night.) 

O passion of being, what dim, dull obstruction 

self-wearing through aeons is aimlessly thinned 

(as at sunset a mountain of vapours' destruction 

is worked of the wind), 

that eternity seething through silently shatters 

itself in this flickering mirage that seems 

like a mask in the night, 

and of substance as frail as a dream among dreams? 

O passion of love, as some wave in mid ocean 

swings onward, huge, heaving, blind, impotent, black, 

yet alive with a universe born of its motion 

and flashing like stars through the swirl of its track, — 

what surging of space self-awakening scatters 

these phantoms on music that beats through the breath 

[ 51 ] 



that nothingness, sleeping on darkness eternal, 

breathes out into life, 

and breathes back into death? 



[ 52 ] 



HYPNOTIC NIGHT. 

Each day a new mirage hangs o'er the scene 

of yesterday's annihilation. Tricks 

are in the dawn and day, the night and earth 

to make the faded old stage-setting worth 

more mock-heroics, more mechanic clicks 

of circumstance or valour or despair, 

as still the same old phantoms gibber there, 

and floats the mote through reeling pageants dressed 

in every tatter of deception — sheen 

of armies, empires, faiths, hopes, ardours, loves. 

And as they drift the innumerable midge 

part, torn and tossed by eddies, and reclose 

with fury; gleams mysteriously quest 

among them till they coalesce and bridge 

as with a rainbow nothingness, — life seems 

such fragmentary shimmering of vexed dreams 

as these, till shattering time's hypnotic night 

the drugged soul wakens from its sleep and screams. 



[ 53 ] 



THE FLAIL OF THE SHADOWS. 

The shadows lengthen. I become 

part of their lapse across the world. 

The morning lays them to the west, 

the evening lays them to the east, 

and, ere this flaking gold has ceased 

to slash with fire a chasmed cloud, 

night on her knees will lay them furled. 

Without a pause, year upon year, 

their phantom fatal balance swings, 

counts out the days and wakes and chills 

the linnet's cry and giddy rings 

the swallows with their slim swift wings 

thread through the green pale twilight sky; 

it spurs these fervid bees to hum 

on shriller wing through flower and grass, 

and tells the unlettered winds that pass 

how old the day; it leads the proud 

stiff dance of dahlias on their stalks 

and wistful casts their petals down; 

it winnows on the sun-burnt hills, 

in wrinkles of the aged earth 

broken with birth and death and birth, 

black poppy-seed, white gossamer. 

The shadows lengthen on the road 

and run out into lakes of gold; 

a furtive mist stirs in the air. 

Without remorse, without regret, 

without remembrance in his eyes, 

the traitor sunlight pales and dies, 

the shadows seek the knees of night. 

O black-fanged hour, that like a goad 

through the heart itself of thought is driven, 

[54] 



how have you given and yet not given 
the mind a flower's impermanence ? 
The shadows lengthen. I become 
part of their lapse; they make me old; 
their rhythmic counterbalance rolled 
about the earth enmeshes me 
in patterns black with impotence. 
Yet even this engined scale that flails 
away the world, dust into dust, 
your eyes fix, love, and wreck and rust 
it lies with all its wheels and bars 
because you love me ; and the black 
pattern it wrought upon my thought 
flames and, like flowers by Spring upthrust 
through ice-enmortised stones, my dreams 
transmute mechanic alternance. 
Through love I conquer, and the days' 
far-balanced, shadowy creeping chills 
no more life's leaping ecstasy — 
O hour that crumples up the world 
with all its leaves and streams and hills, 
so late with flower and bird ablaze, 
and with this mist wipes out the stars ! 



[ 55] 



STRIFE. 

Naked, livid, dead, outstretched she lay 
across the world and on her cave-like mouth 
a hideous vapour hung which hid the stars; 
rigid she lay as thickly through the mist 
throbbed a slow pulse; it was not day nor night 
but some unending twilight of eclipse 
that crouched colossal as a fallen god 
beside her, till the straining darkness cracked 
and dawn oozed blood-red on her sightless eyes. 
Far off a roar of ebbing seas poured on 
in falling thunder; then, like clouds of flies 
that hum o'er carrion on the trodden beach 
of fetid pools, I saw the fire-flaked dead 
rise and fall back in ashes on her face. 



[ 56 ] 



BUDDHA. 

Between his thumb and his ring-finger he 

holds an unopened water-lily and 

the upturned hollow of his long left hand 

shelters an eye-like seed-pod; fixedly 

he gazes on the seed-pod and the flower. 

Cross-legged he sits, hour upon mortal hour, 

and feels his cool bronze body shine and gleam. 

Sometimes the bit of glass stuck in his brow 

glistens in little lost lights, sometimes, how 

I know not, but he seems about to bow, 

or stretch his legs or scratch his head as if 

drifted across dim ages came a whiff 

of salt sea-sharpness stinging through his dream, 

though still as windless water is his dream, 

still as the midnight is of desert skies, 

and still as death will be when all life dies, 

unchangeable, unfathomable. The power 

he has of fixing winklessly his flower, 

as in some lunar trance unending, ends 

by making life a sand heap streaked with stains 

of something slain a jackal drags and rends! 

A writing on the back of him explains 

(this is the way your idol makes amends 

for twitching so the frayed string of my wits 

by simply sitting still the way he sits ! ) 

that in Pen Yang, twelve hundred and fourteen, 

a widow, thankful to an unnamed god 

for one son left her by the pest, had seen 

him tarnished and abandoned of men's prayers, 

mid well-kept gods ranged up the temple stairs, 

C 57 ] 



and caused him to be gilded and made clean 
and put Into an altar-niche to nod, 
or rather not nod, o'er man's fears and tears, 
another paltry half a thousand years. 



[ 58 ] 



ON THE ISAR. 

A river, swift, smooth-sliding, green and clear; 

far off, ranged ragged peaks of keenest snow, 

unutterably quiet as the glow 

dies from the mist-laid valley up the sheer 

huge forehead of the dark; black birds that know 

some twilight secret, and in moveless row, 

fantastic on frail frost-bright poplar tips, 

commune with vastness while the river slips 

eternally beneath them into gloom 

to sounds that build a silence in the air — 

these fade as with its holy witchcraft night 

o'erflows the world and gives my spirit room 

to fathom life as yon star, single there, 

fathoms eternity with steadfast light. 



[ 59] 



PALMS. 

A multitudinous twittering of birds 
ripples around them and the sunset strikes 
their columned shaggy greyness into gold. 

The breathless night falls heavy with hushed storm; 

Silence : then the great arms of the wind 

flung wild across the world. The gaunt palms moan, 

they moan, and half in dreams I seem to hear 

a thousand little voices parched and thin 

laugh fitfully; sharp dusty shivers run 

through them as if skeleton fingers twitched 

with jagged pause on loose and jangling strings. 

They moan and shiver, shiver, moan and sigh 
the hot short sighs of half delirious lips, — 
a seething noise like a strange brittle foam 
of thin glass bubbles bursting on the wind, 
or withered hands innumerable that beat 
flickeringly on the ashen mouth of death. 

They sigh ; the darkness thickens ; night and storm 
and wind hurl monstrous hands upon them, they 
bend grinding like a whirlpool shower of sand; 

they scream in agonies of drought and pain 

till In one wave of swirling surf descends 

the engulfing rain. Then breaks with deafening roar 

the boom of world-wide tides set thunderingly 

on the steep shore of some volcanic isle 

in far white wastes of storm-shook shipless seas. 

I listen numb with fear and all my dreams 
flutter like leaves down to black pools of sleep. 

[ 60] 



Grey dawn : a hollow purr of windless showers 
grows up and dies. One steady rhythmic drop 
drips with a liquid drumming and a bird 
wakens with bubbling voice a wistful song. 



[ 61 ] 



THE LAST PAGE. 

A storm strains in her music — night 
stricken and eyeless from a height 
unthinkable where stars fail falls with cry 
of screaming, fire-torn rains that wreck the sky; 

her music is a darkness white 

with livid, shivered, sword-like light 

split on a smouldering place of crawling fire, 

a garden leprous with clots of fire ; 

her pale arms flash, the feverish flight 

of flying hands eludes my sight ; 

she plays, and all her face, night's self's disguise, 

mocks the unkennelled hell of rent dense skies 

that glare about her music. I 

remember not, I know not why, 

the thing she plays, — her life ? our life ? she plays 

the burning, thronging riot of our days? 

our love? Black memory's coiled flames fly 
into my brain; then splintering high 
over our heads vast clouds of her music break 
crashing the past out quake on quake . . . 

And now I see a garden bright 

with swaying flowers, tall and white 

as faceless thoughts that soar about a dream. 

Silence: the blackening fire-clots hiss and steam 

under the dreary patter of our days. 

The storm is dead, dead memory, dead desire, 

trampled like our lilies. I? I seem 

to care not what she plays now nodding me 

to turn the last page of our destiny. 

[ 62] 



FAITH. 

The shower-soft dawn-cry of the bird-bright spring 

holds field and forest haunted, like a flute 

elfin that wreathes a dream with melody 

unearthly, — field and forest late as mute 

as was my heart before I felt your eyes 

claim me your own, and your life-lighting breath 

with perfume interpenetrate my soul ; 

the shower-soft dawn-cry of the fire-swift spring 
in fields beyond the mountains of to-day, 
and in the pathless forests of our youth, 
again and still again calls us and calls 
unutterably voiced in wind and flower. 

But on this shifting shelf of sunless sand 

morn stirs not yet, and winter strangles May; 

and we life-exiled in far search of truth, — 

we stand and watch huge, foam-wrung, green seas shoot 

thick-swarming thunders white against the land, 

swirl upon swirl, clutching elusive toll 

from scarce dry shores for far-off shores to be. 

And by some false, strange chiming in the brain, 

some grim caprice of overlabouring thought, 

we seem through ways interminable brought 

Into the very image of the bourn 

of all our visions, in all years so sought 

with love and faith and patience, strain and pain, — 

the goal for which we set life's self at nought I 

The low sky deepens, night and emptiness 
gigantic tighten black upon the sky; 
across the sea, like hurtling mountains, press 
all things disastrous, power on grinding power, 

[63 ] 



in sky, In earth, in ocean, without end 

heaved up by fatal tides that creep and cry, 

and move the blind world ever blindly on. 

Vastness ! And yet this ponderous ocean's breath, 

this sky's unthinkable abysm strewn 

with Cyclopean suns that whirl and fly, 

as when one strikes the embers of a fire, 

and bridged with force annihilating, thrown 

weavingly through the dark, know not the goal 

whereon (it was the spirit's mirage-dream) 

we said must break these monstrous tides of death, 

these monstrous senseless moving tides of life. 

So thought outsoars itself, our visions ply 

eternity, till spiring high and higher 

in endless change still seeking changelessness, 

we wake and find our very vision gone, 

and stand before existence even as now 

we stand and watch the black night drink the sea 

and chaos o'er the faceless waters stream. 

Let us forget, my heart, let us forget 

how life is mortgaged to a dream, while yet 

the rain-winged spring treads pregnant ecstasy 

into the hills, and winds and flowers are free 

of even the shadow of a memory; 

how should I gaze still o'er the cloud-bleak sea, 

O love who are the image of my spring, — 

my recreative music deeply heard, — 

when these should be your lips and this your hand? 



[ 64] 



AFTER A YEAR. 

I have had sad and precious thoughts to-day, 

thoughts of our life's wilfulness, still thoughts 

of all its hazardous sharp ways — 

terrible joys and the terrible pain it turning brings to us. 

Does it obey some secret rhythm of time, 

this turning in me of such sad and precious thoughts, 

or is it memory's way with life that this clear day 

calls up the same day of the year just gone? 

Clear day and warm it was too, 

day of wildly beating heart and feet that flew 

up that steep hill to you, 

day when your body strained with birth, your soul strained too, 

and my soul fought for you. 

If it had but been otherwise ! 

Who can foresee what fulness might have been, 

what rounding-out of impulse, 

impulse that now self-poisoned masquerades 

in joyless company 

of these poor cringing thoughts deserters from 

the battling armies of myself — 

these thoughts that never live and never die. 

And yet all loss, yet all our loss, — 

ah, is it only bitterness to feel 

that perfect little body spared 

life's colled enigmas — was it happier so, 

even as It was? 

the fire, the water of the deep lake, they 

better than the life-transforming kiss 

of some undreamed, some treacherous joy like ours? 

[ 65 ] 



O all the things she might have been, my own, 
O all the things she must have been being yours, 
even if she suffered, if life to her were cruel, — 
to her as it at moments is to us, — 
still, still should I have wished her life? 

Yes, out of some dark need of my own nature 
to have her living by me, growing there, 
your image, love, and my own image too, — 
yes, still would I have wished her life. 

But as it is are we, spirit unborn, we three 

more strangely one 

and we are yours more utterly; 

spirit, unsoiled by the world's life 

unsoiled by this world's death, 

who had no life apart from us, no life 

but our own bodies' warm life, — if there be 

existence there in the trackless timeless mist, 

surely in your memory 

no alien shape inhabits, 

surely we only fill your memory. 



[ 66 ] 



BY THE PACIFIC. 

Cloudlike and faint against a cloudless sky, 
floated, far-off, white pinnacles of snow, 
and nearer, all the great green golden land 
sloped seaward through thin sapphire veils of haze 
from folded shadowy hills of amethyst. 

Vague headlands girdled in the blue dark sea, 
the windless, level sea that on the sands 
breathed as in dreams, as darkening wave on wave, 
a curling, cool, green-glimmering chrysoprase, 
poured hissing in smooth broideries of foam, — 

white, seething, soft, fantastic lacework drawn 

miraculous from the blue loom of the sea. 

The sky was laid, a burnished lavender, 

in the wet margin of the shining sand; 

one sharp grey rock guarded the mauve-grey bay. 

We sat and watched the level, gold-flaked sea, 

the fairy scrollwork of pink whorls of cloud 

above a purple island in the west; 

we heard a languorous murmur, rich and strange 

with more than earthly peace; we watched and heard, 

and we were tranquil as the windless sea. 

Far-off white mountain peaks against the sky 
floated like clouds ; the great green golden land 
sloped slowly from dim hills to where the sea 
breathed slumberous song upon the sunlit sands. 



[ 67] 



SHIPWRECK. 

An uncontrollable distress 

divides me from myself, 

the relentless spectre of my nothingness 

blackens my most luminous desire, 

and though my straining wings strike drops of fire, 

a night crawls in between me and myself. 

Nothing to grieve over 

has befallen me, 

I can recover 

from memory 

no token that this evil thing would be, 

and yet my soul founders in an unfathomable sea. 

I have thrown the driftwood of my thought 

upon my hungry passion for more life 

that it should smoulder not, and caught 

up on the flames I made a way 

against the soul-encircling night, — as straw 

I flung my life into the blaze, and awe 

gripped not my hand, nor fear that heaping all on life 

I lose my life. 

Now somehow from the specious day I made 

where my being was to be fulfilled, 

a cold deep-smiting blade 

of dark has cloven me, and killed 

the fire I made. 

Distress uncontrollable 

rots me within, 

and a wind blows up the ashes of my thought 

bitter on the lips, blinding in the eyes, — 

[ 68 ] 



I feel a night begin 

in the very cells of my being where were fought 

my ancient battles with my nothingness in aeons 

dead. 

From the lost shore of other lives no light, — 

only interminably vast, black, soundless, tideless around me 

spread 
myself — the inner midnight of myself — 
pitiless as God and bottomless as death. 



[ 69] 



WESTWARD. 

By hints diverse, glimmerings and inspirations, 

I cross my spirit's undiscovered lands, — 

shorn peaks and corn and vermeil-smitten rivers. 

For me as for a traveller westering, 

slow darkness locks the imprisoned sky, sharp dawn 

strikes like a wing my spirit bare, and light 

lives, and again endures night's reticence, 

with sequence within sequence on a stress 

inscrutable of urgency that throbs 

the mirage of existence into life. 

And risen oft to unremembered places, 

between stark light, stark darkness faltering 

I tenant, like a vexed somnambulist, 

cirque within cirque of self-surviving self, — 

a labyrinthine dark with mirrors set . . . 

But by diverse ways, glimpses, inspirations, 
a music untransmutable is clear, 
vast spans of rhythmic consonance that rear, 
high, huge above self's dwarfed continent, 
unshatterable vaulting of new dreams ; 

and by that sky's co-ordinance I move, 

my life become an instinct and a need, 

a motive incommunicable, freed 

of past and future and intelligence, — 

a promptitude of force, and, issuing thence, 

joy, vision, love, hope, strength, serenity. 



[ 70] 



PRAIRIE FIRES IN NOVEMBER. 

To this, my fire-wild heart's wind-footed love, 

you would be grass that lightly flares and dies 

(all black the land behind is, black and dead — 

a beggar's quivering palm to the snow that flies; 

so are my dreams as snow-cold clouds above 

our lifeless lands) . And you, my love, whose head 

is like a poppy, fluttering flaring thing — 

O flame-soft shadow of a thrilling wing! — 

you to be seared up in a flash of pain, 

you to be snowed on by my sunless dreams, 

my meadow-love, my flower amongst the grain? 

Hour upon hour the reaper steel goes through, 

swinging and singing by the hill-cool streams . . . 

Better the flame, the blackened land, than you, 

you lie here in the scythe's swath, wilted, left, — 

better my fire-wild heart, and like a weft 

of wind-laid sorrow on the barren stain 

that was our garden, better the snow of dreams ! 



[71 ] 



IN A TRANSEPT. 

As in those dreams, Ilarla del Carretto, 

that come to tired sleepers and endure 

till dawn puts tremulous hands on fluttering eyes, 

and smiles her wanest in a white chill chamber — 

while dread day stays his bright foot at the door 

because some shreds of waning visions trail 

still down sleep's sunset cloud-world — you have slept 

and dreamed your dream, Ilaria del Carretto, 

and round you is the radiance of its peace. 

Four hundred years at your dim transept's door, 

your many-bolted, huge, nail-studded door, 

wait like the stricken rabble when kings die ; 

still dance twelve chubby putti with their toys 

about your marble as when Quercia's smile 

in some obscure bottega greeted them 

trooping beneath his chisel into life; 

still through your church the wavering of a voice 

that wails and falls and wails and falls again 

starts flocks of flapping echoes from the vaults, 

and hearing them your timid spaniel, crouched 

against your feet, turns up uneasy eyes 

to many-jewelled pyres of windows high, 

blood-red, sky-blue with vigilant saint and sage. 

And, as the last light falling through them crawls 

across the white floor's storied marquetry 

to let its rainbows die upon your face, 

your sleep is beautiful, your locks are smooth, 

your great ruche crisp, your hands are pure as when, 

in his sharp-windowed sanguine palace near, 

for the last time Guinigi folded them. 



[ 72 ] 



HORIZONS. 

What lies beyond? These soundless sands that lie 

a quivering white against the dawn, are they 

the threshold of our ocean or will day, 

from all its golden heights of fire-domed sky, 

arch only endless to the aching eye 

forever desolation? Was our way 

not clear to us for bones of men that lay 

In death-dim wastes where, love, we did not die? 

Their white bones In our pathway, night by night, 

far off glowed on before us like a streak 

of ghostly stars across this ashen sea. 

What lies beyond? Fought they their farthest fight 

even here with death? Love, love, look up at me! 

This is life's sea's edge If you will but speak! 



[ 73 ] 



MIRAGE. 

Fabricating sun 

and spinning star, 

waking a mirage out of cataclysm 

in nothingness, as one, 

two, then a million systems, comets, seas of planetary mist 

integrate and disintegrate in a breath, — 

making to mar 

the thing made with huge empty strains that web 

eternity from half-dreamed must 

to are, — 

so interpenetrate 

co-ordination, 

dissolution 

and seem brief life, long death. 

Long death, brief life — the flicker meted each 

gigantic sun, sea, mountain, infinitesimal love — 

else all beneath, above, 

a universal echo and the silence-sealing speech 

of sun or sea or lip, — 

save in the intershifting here a slip, 

that weeds a budding order from the grooves, 

shakes the white equilibrium whence began 

(the shadow of the whole across the one 

and the first dream of thought-enfettered man) 

all things where all beginning still is not, 

since what so seems to seem, the individual lot, 

in the tick's focus of a billion years 

cannot be. 

Also this rainbow of humanity — 
this gay prismatic shimmer of a mind 

[ 74] 



across the timeless dull atomic rain — 

what is it but conversion into pain, 

that grinds with infinite whirls impalpable 

the granite of existence into dust, 

of tensions twisting systems and behind 

still systems, spinning bridges o'er a dream 

the friction of whose passage sows with mist 

of nebulae (vague gyroscopic grist 

parthenogenic in immensity) 

its own inanity? 

Surf on a wind-eaten shore 

drummed through a cleft in mountains, roar 

of self-tormented tides that sway 

on the huge oscillation of aeonic law — 

so strums itself the ungraspable mind, 

intones the eternal welter whereof it 

(as space-vast torsions stud with sparks the night) 

is self-unseeing light. 



[ 75 ] 



IN THE CAB OF NO. 3303. 

THE BREATH OF THE BAY. 

Faster the storming piston whirls and whirls 

our roaring drivers; fierce and wide we swing 

on crashing side-thrusts ; bright the lithe rods spring 

forward like tigers; far our head-light hurls 

Its white sword through the darkness ; earth unfurls 

reelingly fence and field; the blue rails ring; 

the black ties scream up under us and fling 

time back where night, black-eddying, streams and swirls 

a house: a mist: a streak of sea: a rock: 

trees hurtle at us, flicker, flee — a light ! 

Then the low-grinding set seeth of our brakes; 

a tunnel's earthquake thunder cracked with shock 

and split with glare ; then wind, sea-wind, and bright 

a star that on a hilltop leaps and shakes. 



[ 76 ] 



STRONGHOLDS. 

This grim grey tower that sentinels the sky 
is as my bitter spirit Is to-day; 

sheer gigantic symbol of the way 
men live with one another thou art I ! 

1 am thy steep defiance to the world, 

I am thy bastloned place when treachery 

writhes like a snake through all that is without. 

Are not my doors like thine of fire-hard steel? 

Does not my crag-rough spirit o'er the rout 

of foam-fast life gloom and behold life die? 

Tower of my heart, the clamorous ages reel 

in drunken battle-frenzy like a tide 

around thee, foaming, broken, till they hide 

their very being in the bones of thee; 

tower of my heart, thou bitterest tower, the sea 

alone has thy foundation and thy strength. 

Yet hast thou, tower, hast thou been left at length, 

empty and palsied In the empty land? 

Thou who couldst all the hosts of hate withstand 

and roll them from thee backward, shalt thou be, 

because thy foes are dead, a memory, 

a withered sign of strife that is no more? 

And if thou crumbiest, what meant then the fight 

that, helmeted and plumed with hideous wrong, 

swarmed once around thee, tossed and broke in flight? 

What means our world-wide war with world-wide brute 

if emptiness can waste thee at the root? 

And yet the senseless stars that know thee not 

have seen ten thousand thousand, strong as thou 

art in thine unrent tenantless estate, 

waste as the rocks waste, as the mountains rot, 

foredoomed to ruin having once been great. 

[77] 



The chill sky changes not, however thou 

because they have forsaken thee must change — 

as still beyond my fortress soul a thought 

grey as eternity lies like a mist 

over the land and sea of life and death; 

and I know not my thought save only now, 

when all things fail and at life's steel-shod door 

death sits, life's iron warder, now when breath 

is grimly drawn in seerless fortitude, 

I breathe as thou dost, waiting, dreaming how 

the mist will rise and bid us also raise 

our eyes above the past's peaks seamed and strewn 

with all disaster. Tower, behold I bow 

and pray to what I know is not divine, 

life's grey dumb strength whereof thou art a sign 

held up to God that He may know at last 

His creature than Himself sublimer grown . . . 

Tower of my soul, the prayer I make is thine, 

and, when the unanswering future is the past, 

the prayer that I shall make thy very own I 



[ 78 ] 



POSSESSION. 

Last night I knew that It would rain to-day — 
as we sat there, I knew that it would rain; 
though I had prayed that he might die, dismay 
took hold of me to think that he was dead; 
I thought of simple things as if for dread, 
till quietly she spoke : "The way is plain . . . 
death has removed the shadow from our way, 
death and my love." No voice of love or pain 
lived in her words. They fell on me like flame, 
and on her cheeks and on her mouth I shed 
the kisses of dead years that died in vain 
for all my love, while she was his to claim, 
if with his lips he merely named her name — 
his ! — she stood like stone from foot to head, 
till in her throat a sudden fluttering came 
and went . . . and left her lying on the bed. 

She did not speak — she did not weep — the house 

was silent with a chill that stopped my heart; 

I know not what it was that made me start 

as I drew up her cold face to my face 

softly — did I dream he called below? 

Why else should I have said as if to grace 

the clamour of my blood with some disguise 

of trembling memory: "Love, love, do you 

remember when the year began to drowse 

toward winter, one still night we sat, we two, 

with him, since there was nothing left to do ? 

and you, without a sign of eyes or hand 

to show you knew what fearful visions fed 

upon my heart, watched me ? We talked and smiled 

like quiet friends the twilight hours beguiled, 

[ 79 ] 



though like a flame I felt your speechless eyes 
madden my brain with things that could not be . . . 

had I known that you could understand, 
that you could thus have loved me for a blow 

1 did not strike and could not !" — -It must be 
I half forgot she told me he was dead. 

And still as with wild fingers I unbound 

her hair and set her chilling bosom free, 

and drew her soft, bare, pulseless arms round me, 

she did not stir — she did not speak. My heart 

beat thickly in my lips against her mouth 

that seemed to mutely beg me to depart, 

I know not why, — I know not if she knew; 

only I know her eyes were like the South 

when storms pile up great glooms without a sound, 

and flickering lights played in them faintly — fear 

seized me again, she saw it in my eyes, 

she felt it in the slackening of my kiss, 

as wildly with a strange, uncoiling hiss 

in sank her breath upon my faltering lips — 

she clutched me sinking, like a shell that slips 

into the sea, through dumb glooms shaken slow 

upon her struggling bosom's ebb and flow . . . 

It is dawn now — I feel within my brain 
the senseless, blank monotony of rain. 
Her naked breasts lie still against the light, 
shadowless and smoothly pale — her eyes 
flutter with the failing of her sighs 
faintly — her cheeks are weary and some soil 
of tears hangs in their pallor — vaguely warm 
her breath creeps on my eyes — I hardly dare 
to look where on this pillow streams her hair 

[ 80 ] 



sickening me with a sense of things that coil. 
I only see her now as eyes may see, — 
for something has departed with the night, 
departed, and I know not what may be, — 
she lies so still — and all things are so vain ! 
She sleeps so calm, — it cannot be that she . . . 
But God, I shall go mad, if on the pane 
beats, with such senseless futile grief, the rain! 



[ 81 ] 



TRANSLATIONS. 



FROM STEPHANE MALLARME: POESIES. 

I. LES FLEURS. 

From avalanches of the ancient sky, 
golden, and from an endless snow of stars, 
thou, God, the first day culled these chalices 
for earth new-born and virgin of her scars. 

Wild sun-spurge, like the swan Is slim of throat, 

the bay divine of souls In time exiled 

silver as feet of soaring seraphim 

swept over blushing dawn-clouds undefiled; 

these hyacinthine blooms, this myrtle bud 
gleaming, and like a woman's flesh, the rose, 
Herodias' daughter of some garden close, 
fierce, and bedewed with fierce bright dews of blood! 

Thou madest the tall lily's sobbing white 
that tossing wings a sea of sighs where sleep 
pallid horizons of the perfumed blue, 
or rises dreamlike to wan moons that weep ! 

Hosanna on sharp strings and censers swung. 
Father, hosanna, from this garden of the Shades ! 
Mid twilight glooms the mystic echo fades, — 
ecstatic eyes, clear halos flash among! 

Father, thou madest. In thy just heart and calm, 
chalices that sway a phial of spicy dower, — 
these thy great flowers, — and death thou madest a balm 
to the poet's weary soul life withers hour by hour. 



[ 85 ] 



11. LE TOMBEAU D' EDGAR POE. 

Such as to Himself eternity shall change 
the Poet strikes with naked sword and sure 
his age amazed that never knew this pure 
voice crowning death with subtle art and strange ! 
Him they, base coll of hydras, hearing him, 
angel, give sense more rare to tribal words 
acclaim now drunk with brews where thick as curds 
dishonours upon incantations swim. 

From hostile sod and hostile cloud, ah grief ! 

if this our thought hew not a bas-relief 

for Poe's tomb reared resplendent on life's shore; 

calm block in dim disaster fallen to earth, 

this granite sets a term forevermore 

to Blasphemy's black flight through time's rebirth. 



[ 86] 



FROM PALAZZESCHI: POEMI. 
I. LA CENA DEGLI INFELICL 

At their long table seated, 

long table and narrow, 

the unhappy are eleven. 

With luxury's glamour 

the table is spread. 

Exuberant flowers, 

gold vases and silver. 

In a row the eleven 

in perfect rigidity 

changelessly sit 

without ever turning 

to this side or that side. 

Palm against palm, 

with finger-tips touching, 

their elbows together, 

their eyebrows all arching 

and all their lips drawn, 

they watch each dish passing. 

One only abstracted 

with his fork on the cloth 

makes over and over, 

traces untiring 

the same letter O. 

And one on the white cloth 

his napkin-ring rolls 

up and down, up and down 

rolls it and rolls. 

The dishes before them 

change hurriedly ever; 

soups steaming and purees 

[ 87] 



delicious and pates 
most tasty by thousands. 
But food the eleven 
touch never, immobile 
regarding askance 
the swift endless passing 
of dishes before them. 
From gardens forbidden 
herbs skilfully seasoned, 
woodcock and pheasant 
pass by in the dishes 
of these the unhappy; 
most tender of green things 
and sweetmeats the rarest. 
Incredible sweetmeats, 
fruits red as a ruby, 
wines too of all colours 
in glasses, in crystal, — 
champagne, liqueur, coffee. 
The eleven immobile 
sit palm against palm, 
with finger-tips touching, 
with elbows together, 
In perfect rigidity 
not ever once turning 
to this side or that side, 
their eyebrows all arching 
and all their lips drawn; 
with no vestige of wonder 
their eyes look askance 
at the dish that is passing. 



[ 88 ] 



11. LA REGINA CARMELA. 

The tower that Is highest 

of the palace vast and splendid 

is unchangingly her throne. 

The queen Carmela 

leaves her tower not an Instant, 

never she comes down It never. 

The palace great and regal 

on the sea's edge rises grandly, 

with rare marbles richly ornate 

and Its towers unequal are; 

close behind It stand up mountains. 

The queen Carmela 

leaves her tower not an Instant, 

never she comes down It never; 

about her falls a mantle, 

most ample, falls, most precious, 

of scarlet spun 

with veils of scarlet swathed and swathed about. 

High up there the wild wind rages, 

lifts and billows out her mantle, 

lifts Its veils 

and her yellow unbound hair; 

to the wild wind she Is a prey, 

and now she seems a flame 

that Is shaken by the wind 

and now a tongue of fire 

rising from the mighty palace. 

The sea-folk gaze upon her, 

she Is like a lighthouse to them there on high, 

a sinister dark lamp to all her people. 

The hill-folk gaze upon her, 

from the level lands they see the little queen. 

[ 89 ] 



And they stand and look and wonder 

staring up with eyes of pain 

at the scarlet robe wind-shaken 

and her yellow, loosened, thick and flying hair . . . 

Weeping, marvelling, her people 

watch their little queen, their trivial queen Carmela. 



[90] 



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